It was just shortly after they finished that Susan Chambers ventured through it for the first time. "By the time I walked through it a second time, I knew it was my dream house," she says.
But finding the house was only a small step in making that dream come true.

"We really like this neighborhood. We were really happy, but we needed more space," Susan says. "So I started looking around and found this house the FDA was fixing up just a couple of blocks away, and I kept my eye on it while they were working."

Kevin and Susan Chambers and their four daughters are finally talking seriously again about getting a puppy. For years, the family lived in the parsonage across the street from the Avondale United Methodist Church in Franklinton where Kevin serves as pastor.
But Susan always dreamed that the family would one day own their own home. And besides, as their daughters all grew into teenagers, the parsonage and its single bathroom went from merely cramped and inconvenient to being desperately too small.

The house at 222 Avondale Ave. was a special project for the FDA. One way it was different was that there was a conflict between historic sensitivity and safety. The entire exterior was of the house was covered in lead based paint. Normally siding would be used to encapsulate the paint but not on a building determined to be historic. Instead a specially licensed painting company was used to repaint make it safe while keeping the historic integrity. A special city grant helped cover the significantly higher painting cost.
To make the budget stretch farther, board member Bruce Warner and his wife Janis did a lot of the finish work themselves, varnishing the beautiful woodwork and giving the place and good, thorough cleaning.
"The place was really great inside already before we did any work to it," Warner says. "Don't get me wrong, it was a lot of work, but we've had houses that took a lot more than that one did."

"The FDA set us up with a homeownership class through the Columbus Housing Partnership, and that really opened our eyes to a lot of things," Kevin Chambers says. "I had never given any thought to owning our own home because, like a lot of people around here, I never thought we could ever afford it.
"But we learned about our credit score and how to make some changes to improve that, learned about using our debt ratio to see how much we could afford, and then just learned about the process of buying a house. There was a lot of work we had to do to make it work, and it's been a lot of work ever since, but it's worth it."

Since they bought the house, the Chambers have upgraded the wiring in several rooms, partially finished the basement and the attic, did a little more work in the garage and have recently installed a fence surrounding the yard.
"The girls have always wanted to get a puppy, but we could never have had one at the old house," Susan Chambers says. "Now that we have all these things we've always wanted, our own house, two big bathrooms, and a fenced-in yard, we've been looking for puppies again. The whole process has been quite an experience. It's been challenging at times, but worth it. We're really happy here."

The house had been unoccupied for several months before the FDA bought it, and thieves had broken in at one point trying to get at that woodwork. "Luckily, something scared them away before they could get it out of the house, so we just had to put it all back together," Warner says. "The woodwork was really just beautiful."
While the garage is a big bonus on the house, it presented another challenge in the budget. It was built several years after the house and not with as much care. Warner literally had to jack up the frame from the concrete slab to replace rotting boards and studs at the bottom. He put on a new roof and installed a new door.